Frank Bruni

The esteemed food critic on his new memoir, Born Round

Books about eating disorders are practically a genre these days, but the latest entrant is a category-buster: It's by a boy, who is also a restaurant critic, who is also employed by the august New York Times. In Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater (Penguin, $25.95), Frank Bruni, 44, tells of growing up—and rotund—in a food-obsessed Italian family; yo-yo-ing through his twenties; and eventually, at 39, conquering his demons enough to become a "professional eater." Bruni learned early that in his family, where dinner was planned by 10 a.m. and the women were "puzzled by and censorious of" anyone who didn't have a freezer in the garage filled with "chops, strips, patties, and roasts," food was love, and taking a pass on Mom's lasagna or Grandma Bruni's "frits" was like personally rejecting them. Yet wolfing down these offerings earned him "fat boy" cat-calls and pants from the "husky" section. We caught up recently with Bruni and got him to dish about diets, body image, his still occasional pig-outs, and Born Round, a lively departure from his first two books (about, respectively, George Bush and sex abuse in the Catholic Church).

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How did you manage to turn the corner on your weight in Italy?

I was assigned to the Rome bureau and everybody said, `Oh, this could be a disaster.' But in Italy a great meal isn't defined by prime rib being two pounds. It's about the fineness of the arugula, the quality and the sensations. [Living there] helped me enormously to develop a better approach to eating.

How do you think being gay, which, by the way, you discuss refreshingly matter-of-factly, figures into your story? Most straight men I know wouldn't care if they put on five, ten pounds—or at least they wouldn't let it stop them from pursuing, say, sexual conquests.

There's a big difference between being the object of male attention [versus] female. In media images, you see countless examples of unattractive men and beautiful women. So straight women and gay men get the message that our currency is dependent in part on how we look. My sister and I were much more bound up in what our bodies were like than our [straight] brothers— we both sought the attention of men.

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Speaking of your family, the most critical you get about anyone is to say your mom pushed food on you one minute and diet books the next. That's it?

It's become the memoir-default to rake family over the coals, but I won't distort reality because it might be sexier. My mother and I were extremely close. But she was a classic example of a woman who was bright and competitive and who, because she chose not to have a career and to stay home, ended up being vicariously very competitive through her children: Bs on report cards, lost swimming races were dark days. Not Joan Crawford dark, but...

Was she critical of your weight?

She wouldn't call me fat. I just remember having this very clear sense of what I was supposed to wear: no plaids, no horizontal stripes, dark colors rather than light. All of it was rendered in a loving and constructive way, but if you're a kid predisposed to worry about weight, you hear that advice as criticism as well. [But] at the end of the day,my tortured relationship with food had as much to do with how my brain was wired as [anything else].

Yes, you write that you were a ravenous eater from infancy.

My parents always were astonished by how much I could eat. I shoveled it down and opened my mouth for more. That's not environmental. So I think what set me on such a weird trajectory was that proclivity to eat compulsively, played out in a family in which food was such an important currency.

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According to the book, you're 5-foot-11, and the highest your weight ever got was 268...

That's the highest I knew it to be; I never get on scales. But when I heard that number, during a physical, I was eating better and exercising. So not only was it horrible, but I thought, My god, I must have gotten up to 275 at one point.

Again, I can only give pants sizes. I'm fitting comfortably into my 34s; I've had moments where I could squeeze into 33s, but I'm not freaked out. Now, if I find I can't fit into the 34s again. . .

Do you still worry about losing control of your weight?

In a vague sense. But I don't panic, because I think the whole problem for me, and a lot of people, is panicking. If I sense I've gained a few pounds, for the next couple of days I try to run a little more, stop myself a few bites shy of where I might otherwise. I'm not one of those people who's protected by metabolism or by the limits of appetite. It's always made me laugh when someone says, "Oh, I forgot to eat today." Those people are like space creatures to me. In a way I envy them, but do they really get as much pleasure out of food as the rest of us?

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Some people eat to live, others live to eat.

I live to eat.

And yet, you found a way to control your weight. Let me sum up the approach: Don't diet or let yourself get unbearably hungry. Listen to hunger and eat food you like and find satisfying, but not too much of it. And exercise! Finally, be reasonable. As you write, "If I set some matinee idol's physiognomy as my goal, and wallowed in self pity at any condition short of that, [I'd be] acting like the same self-defeating fool who'd fried his face in front of a sun lamp and bleached his hair in pursuit of a silly ideal."

I'd agree with all that, except I `diet,' if we take diet to mean trying to keep under 1700 calories a day [the number varies by person]. But never go on a severely calorie-restricted or gimmicky diet.

Want to talk about your mother's pig-on-pig phase?

She became obsessed with wrapping things in bacon: chicken livers, scallops, even hotdogs. I've come to think of her as way ahead of her time, because in food circles now, the big thing is bacon in everything: brussels sprouts, chowder. . .

Yum. So I read online that you got `north of half a million bucks' for this memoir. Do you think the high price tag was because your name is Frank instead of Francesca—a man confessing to what's usually women's turf?

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This story pivots on the irony of someone who's been tortured by food for a lifetime finding a healthy enough relationship with it to make it a professional focus. If Francesca Bruni were a restaurant critic, publishers would have been just as interested.

Speaking of men and women, in the book you mention that you were once accused of being biased against female chefs, but you don't defend yourself. Are you?

I didn't defend it because it's ludicrous. I have more women than men friends, and as you know from the book, I grew up in something of a matriarchy. When I'm eating in a restaurant, I'm not conscious of whether the person in charge of the food preparation has one set of genitalia or another.

What's your favorite New York City restaurant?

If money were no object, probably the most transcendent experience was Masa, in the Time-Warner Center. But that's, like, a $400 a head sushi restaurant.

What are the eating capitals of the world?

You know, Rome has terrific Italian restaurants, Paris terrific French restaurants, but New York has a pan-ethnic scene that Paris and Rome can't match. We've been a polyglot city for much longer. To use a baseball metaphor, the depth of our bench is incredible.

You've been accused of—or credited with—being "most entertaining" when you have your "claws out." Are you snarky?

If a restaurant is foisting a bad experience on people, I don't feel guilty calling them out. And when I've written a negative review, I definitely let myself indulge in a little snark, because that's a way of giving people a lively read. The vast majority of people reading a restaurant review will never set foot in the restaurant.

Fair enough. So how's Tom, the sexy gentleman you meet at the end of the book?

If you're my age and gay and you've lived in a country that for this long has led you to believe you wouldn't have the option to marry, you [know you] can make a rock solid commitment to someone with words and actions as much as with any piece of paper.

But if you do end up marrying, who will cater it?

I'd tend to prefer a very small group of people in a romantic and distinctive location, as opposed to like 500 guests in New York. You know? Some spot on the coast of California or Italy would be awesome. I'd love to be able to hear and feel the ocean.

What's your favorite thing to eat?

Can I name a few? I love heavily buttered, heavily salted popcorn. And I love a big fat steak, properly aged, properly broiled or grilled, with a char on it. I could probably eat three pounds of that.

So you're not a sweets person?

Well, I've been known to tunnel my way through more ice cream than God, but I'm a total carnivore. I can eat a scary amount of duck. And about once a month I get out a big bowl, put an entire roast chicken in it, sit on the couch, and eat it with my hands.

Ha! And no guilt?

At a certain point, you accept that there are certain unchangeable aspects of you, and if you try to shut them down completely, they come back and bite you harder.

And thin now or not, you still, according to your book, eat your baguette on the way home from the deli and drip the jam all over your shirt. I love that.

I have more shirts ruined by stains on the front than you would believe. They should make me a spokesperson for Shout.